"Crowdsourcing" and "Authority"

After listening to a very good discussion between Joe Rogan and James Lindsay, there was one part of the interview that stuck an off note with me. I thought it worth a few words of commentary.

I recently listened to the January 20, 2022 podcast from the Joe Rogan Experience with Dr. James Lindsay. Dr. Lindsay came to prominence through his efforts with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose to expose the corrupt nature of the academic peer review process by submitting made up research papers to leading academic journals for review and eventual publication. Since then, Dr. Lindsay has been doing yeomen’s work diagnosing, exposing and explaining neo-Marxist critical theory to a wide audience. His success has garnered invitations to the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience. It is a small portion of this most recent interview that I wish discuss. I encourage you to listen:

The Joe Rogan Experience #1767 - James Lindsay

Beginning at the 53:15 point Dr. Lindsay says that he is no longer worried about misinformation, just propaganda. His idea is to get as much information out there to let as many people as possible dig into the the data and then trust that there are enough obsessives out there such that spurious research and erroneous conclusions will be exposed in relatively short order.

There is some merit to this idea, and it has produced results. My difficulties with this are not its efficacy in any particular situation, but with the underlying assumptions and where they lead once you follow them out to their logical and practical conclusions. Truth be told, this is what I am doing right now: unsolicited crowdsourced critique. When he says that he is more concerned with propaganda than misinformation, it appears to me, if I understand him correctly, that his concern is with gatekeeping, agendas and the manipulation of information towards various ends, whether they be personal, political, social, financial, institutional or some other reason. Someone or some entity or some power wants to control the narrative and is willing to bury, destroy, misrepresent, and falsify information and research such that all messages conform to their desired story, their desired narrative. It is a corruption of authority for nefarious purposes.

His proposed solution is to bypass the gatekeepers. Or more radically to discredit and tear them down, potentially eliminating the all gatekeeping authorities, getting the information out there as widely as possible to see if it can be debunked or not. It seems like a good idea on the surface. Open source. Democratic. Egalitarian. Horizontal rather than hierarchical. The little guys taking it to the man. Beat back propaganda with reliable, crowdsourced information. The brochure is lovely. But, in the end it is a “revolutionary” idea, an information revolution.

My first problem with this idea, other than its revolutionary undertones, is that it ends up being a regressive argument. Who checks the obsessive guy looking at the data in his dark cubicle or mother’s basement? And then who checks the guy who checks him? And then who checks the guy who checks the guy who checks the guy? The rejoinder would be, “Isn’t this how the inductive method is supposed to work?” In the brochure version of scientific inquiry, sure. Everyone obsessively checking everyone else’s work without regard to position, status or power. In this kind of process, what is true will eventually emerge, or so the argument goes. The reality on the ground is much different. Scientific inquiry itself is a hot mess of established orthodoxies, vested interests, political agendas, ideological quackery and just plain incompetency.

In reality, what happens is often the exact opposite. The process, however well intended, and in spite of it having some efficacy, in practice, has the opposite result. When broadly applied across society, it clears the path for totalitarian manipulation. For the average person, the constant barrage of information wears down their ability to think critically and to even form their own thoughts. As Jacques Ellul explained exhaustively in his seminal work Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, a significant part of making people ready for propaganda involves breaking down the mediating institutions of society, tearing people away from the small tightly knit social structures within which they find themselves. Part of that process is overwhelming them with mass messaging and mass information. Another part of it involves tearing down and discrediting the people that they used to regard as authoritative.

Much of it was done not for political ends, but for commercial goals. People wanted to sell other people their stuff. In small tight knit communities where everyone knows what they believe, who they are, what they will do for a living, who their friends are and whom they marry, there are very few choices that they are burdened with making. Advertisers began putting cracks into those structures, offering wider choices of goods to buy or own. At the same time, liberal political ideology began to emphasize personal choice over the suffocating demands of the community. Many welcomed this opportunity to break free from home, family and community with all its restrictions and they embraced the power of making their own choices. And society has not really looked back. Even most conservatives would not want to give up their freedom of choice to go back to living in small, tight-knit communities. We pine after the feel of community, but just can’t bring ourselves to embrace the reality of it.

This is a simplified and stripped down explanation for sure, but it is more or less the situation we find ourselves in. Most of the mediating institutions that used to buffer us from the large political and corporate entitles, those that are most likely to engage in propagandistic manipulation for political or commercial ends, have been swept away, or discredited, or abandoned, or weakened. It has left the average person largely at the mercy of these larger entities to be manipulated by them through propaganda for purposes of political or commercial power and gain.

At the same time that this protection has been removed, the number of choices each person is responsible for has risen exponentially. We have to decide everything for ourselves on our own, including forming our own identity. This leads to a lot diffuse psychic anxiety. People become paralyzed by the number of choices they have to make. I see it all the time in my work. A big part of it is helping clients narrow down their options so as to lessen the anxiety they have in making a choice.

What Ellul tells us is that the propagandist preys on this psychic anxiety in the formation of mass behavior. The propagandist narrows the options for a person. They will make the person feel like they belong to something larger, a simulacrum of the old mediating institution, but they are not. They are isolated and alone, it is just them and the propagandist. They have become “mass man.” They are bombarded with information and choice and the propagandist simplifies their choices for them and focuses their actions. Once the isolated mass man acts, he then conforms his thoughts to the propaganda, believing that what he thinks are his own thoughts.

The strange new twist in this during the last 20 years, but mostly the last 10, is the growth of the internet and social media. Although there are still maniacal propagandists out there - the Goebbels are still among us - much of what social media does is crowdsource the propaganda. We have become our own evil dictator through the use of social media generated social pressure. On the one hand, it helps generate the anxiety; and then at the same time promises to relieve that same anxiety through conformity in shared actions. This process helps explain the weird proliferation of BLM protests in countries with no historical connection to the American history of slavery and segregation. The argument I am advancing here is that Dr. Lindsay’s proposal to crowdsource the breaking down of propaganda narratives surrounding Covid-19 is simply a similar phenomenon, a cousin so to speak, of the ideologized attempts of the critical theorists to break down “narratives of oppression.” They are two sides of the same coin in the social media environment of self-propagandization. It becomes a battle not so much of truth vs. propaganda; but rather one of my propaganda vs. your propaganda.

So what to do? Part of the reason we find ourselves in this predicament in the first place is that in a world where there are fallible people, communities and authorities do become corrupt, toxic, oppressive and authoritarian in all of the worst ways. But by constantly challenging and breaking down structures and authorities, we destabilize society, helping to create wide spread diffuse anxiety in the name of freedom, and in so doing open ourselves to propagandistic totalitarianism.

Dr. Lindsay’s solution is to double down on information proliferation. It is a defensible argument and has had its successes. In my mind, this is one of the key points that distinguishes a liberal in the classical sense from a conservative. I would argue that what needs to be recovered is the re-emergence of healthy and trustworthy “authorities.” One of the characteristics of a conservative is that they are biased more to accepting and valuing authority and authorities than is the liberal. The conservative wants to protect what is, and the liberal wants to challenge that existing order. In a healthy society both impulses are needed. The conservative would argue that a healthy society is one that is slow to change and values those things that are tried and true and have worked, however imperfectly, for a long time. The liberal presses to change them. Societies that cannot adapt and change do die. The problem we face today is that there is not much left to conserve. We have torn down so much in our attempts to remake society, hoping to usher in a better future based on science, technology and reason that little remains of the old organically formed ways.

Part of the challenge we have today with credentialism is that any idiot with a degree and a platform can become an “expert.” Just about everyone with a degree expects to be taken seriously as if they are authorities. But it is hard to find true authorities today, especially ones who are trustworthy and free from “grift,” free from grasping after success, power, money and fame. In some sense, we relish exposing and tearing down those authorities who show themselves as unworthy. And there is plenty of deserving targets.

There is a burden that comes from being an authority. Dr. Lindsay himself has become an authority, a trusted voice. He has earned this status. People turn to him to simplify their choices and help them decide how to act. It is a heavy and weighty responsibility. There are older structures that still exist where these qualities reside in the office itself and place a heavy burden on the office holder. Pastoral ordination is one. You get up onto a pulpit and it is understood that you are expected every Sunday to bring to people the “word of God.” It is prophetic, priestly. It is mind boggling to think that you get up in front of a group of people and have the responsibility to say “thus says the Lord.” Of course, modern pastors want to slough that off and “give talks” and the like. They want to shy away from the burden and responsibility of being an authority. This is also why it is so devastating when clergy are corrupt and abusive. It shatters the very structures of people’s reality.

We have few, or no “village elders” that we can go to, so we pay people to counsel and advise us. We bring them our fears, anxieties and problems and expect them to relieve us of our anxiety and tell us how to live in our society.

I am not sure that there is any easy “solution” to this problem. The internet of things will continue its corrosive effects while providing some benefits as well. We might as well take advantage of them when we can. But I think it is perhaps also a call that if we find ourselves in a position where people look to us as an “authority” that we take that role seriously and do our best to keep ourselves free from all of the petty ambitions, rewards, and temptations that would undermine our authority. Also, when you find someone in your community circles who fills that role of the authority, of the elder, make sure you treasure them because this person may be one of the lights that helps keep your ship sailing straight and may be one of your best defenses against the ravages of the propagandist.